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A whole new breed of customers is rising — one that wants something different. The growers who will be the most successful are the ones who figure out what those consumers want and how they can provide it.

Sedan Floral lived and nearly died by its old chain store business model. Jonathan Cude says forgetting everything he knew about the greenhouse business and starting over has the operation growing — and profitable — once again.

Sedan Floral, a Greenhouse Grower Top 100 Grower in Sedan, Kan., was faced with some tough decisions seven years ago. After losing most of the business from two major chain store customer accounts and struggling to pick up the pieces for several years, Sedan’s leadership cut production significantly and reinvented the operation to appeal to a much broader customer base of independent garden centers. That strategy has slowly but surely returned the operation to profitability. A willingness to change everything was necessary for the long-term survival of the company, says Sedan president and CEO Jonathan Cude. “If the current business model you’re using fails to work, be willing to stop, press reset on your brain, erase everything and start over,” Cude says. “Be open to change. “It’s cliché. Everybody says it. But that’s what we did. And it’s working.” In the slideshow below, get a look inside the operation, including […]

When Color Star Growers, the ninth largest greenhouse grower in the country, declared bankruptcy in December 2013, the sale of its greenhouse facilities provided growth opportunities for new and existing businesses.

The Top 100 Growers were production-driven businesses just a few years ago. Many grew seemingly endless products and had the good fortune of finding buyers even in a pinch. Discounting was an option to keep product moving, and margins were favorable. Fast forward to today’s Top 100, and it’s a sales-driven group that talks largely about tighter margins and the need to have the right product on the right shelves at the right time. The truth is today’s industry is vastly different than the one many of the Top 100 originally experienced. And the strongest growers are the ones adapting their operations and tailoring products to the retailer’s needs. “You just can’t overproduce something today,” says Randy Gilde, an owner at Delray Plants. “You can move some of it, but generally if your product isn’t positioned at the right time and place for the store and its customers, you can’t […]